Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

1963: Number 31 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of dance musicArizona-born Mingus was one of jazz's greatest composers, a double-bass virtuoso, a challenger of racism inside and outside the white-run music business of his time, and a volatile individual with an incendiary temper. But though he creatively adapted the techniques of such 20th-century composers as Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Mingus infused everything he wrote with the blues and gospel music of his childhood...

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